WekaIO Places in Top Five of The Virtual Institute's IO-500 10 Node Challenge

WekaIO,
the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for
data intensive applications, today announced its achievement of a
second-place ranking on the IO-500 10 Node Challenge list, coming within
5% of the world's fastest Supercomputer. The IO-500 is a ranking list
comparing storage systems that work in tandem with the world's largest
supercomputers. Each system is evaluated by the IO-500 benchmark that
measures the storage performance using read/write bandwidth for large
files and read/write/listing performance for small files. Storage
performance in supercomputers is critical for large-scale simulation,
big data analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI). The IO-500 list
serves as a resource for companies looking to improve their storage
performance, which in turn helps to improve processor performance.

WekaIO ran the IO-500 test on eight Supermicro BigTwin™ enclosures,
representing less than half of a storage server rack, and scored 67.79,
coming within 5% of the Oak Ridge Summit Supercomputer which ran its
system on a 40 rack Spectrum (News - Alert) Scale storage cluster. The benchmark suite
includes a hero-run of both IOR and mdtest configured in whichever
manner possible to maximize performance and establish an upper-bound for
performance. Finally, it includes an IOR and mdtest run with highly
prescribed parameters to determine a lower-bound.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the results of the 10-node challenge,"
said Barbara Murphy, Vice President of Marketing at WekaIO. "This
benchmark testing demonstrates that we can deliver performance that
competes with the largest supercomputing torage systems, but with a
much more cost-efficient and simplified solution. The takeaway is that
Matrix delivers more I/O density than Spectrum Scale, or other legacy
file systems, which makes us the leader in price/performance value. Now,
for the first time, HPC-class storage performance is accessible to the
enterprise for deep learning and analytics workloads in a greatly
simplified configuration with low CapEx and OpEx overhead."

"Supermicro's Resource-Saving BigTwin™ is our highest performing
free-air cooled 2U multi-node system supporting 205-watt processors, 24
DIMMs, hot-swap NVMe flash storage, flexible I/O and an incredible 10%
power savings compared to typical 1U servers," said Michael McNerney,
Vice President of Marketing at Supermicro. "The high ranking on the
IO-500 test is quite impressive because WekaIO was able to achieve
greater performance in one-half the rack space with better power and
cooling efficiency. This performance density, hot-swappable nodes, and
cable-less server design are key requirements for the success of new HPC
rack deployments."

"The combination of Mellanox's (News - Alert) RDMA and DPDK accelerated InfiniBand and
Ethernet solutions and WekaIO software platform provide leading IO
performance as can be seen on the IO500 list," said Gilad Shainer, Vice
President of Marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "By leveraging the
smart interconnect acceleration engines, WekaIO can utilize off the
shelf servers and SSDs to bring world leading performance at lower total
cost of ownership. We look forward to seeing even higher performance
results with our new 200G gigabit generation."

The WekaIO Matrix software is an NVMe-native, resilient file system that
runs on commodity servers, delivering the highest bandwidth, lowest
latency performance to any InfiniBand or Ethernet enabled GPU or CPU
based cluster. Integrated tiering automatically and transparently
migrates cold data to any S3 compatible cloud for low cost and limitless
scale. The POSIX compliant file system runs more efficiently than NFS
and leverages an innovative, customized protocol to deliver file-based
semantics. As a result, Matrix exceeds NFS performance in a sharable
file system solution.